watson

This October I had the privilege of participating in the IBM-Watson-Conversation Hackathon in London, as part of a five person BBC team. We eventually won out of the fifteen teams that participated, with our combination of technology, ‘human interest’ and humour being noted.

Conversation is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine, that allows the construction of non-linear, non-brittle dialogs. It’s integrated into a wider eco-system of IBM and Watson based products, using the IBM BlueMix cloud platform as its bedrock, so getting off the ground is as easy-as-pie. It also enables integration with select external services such as Foursquare and Twilio.